Indian Zuckerberg in 5-6 Years: Khosla

Times of India

September 06, 2013

Age hasn't dimmed his passion for entrepreneurship even a wee bit. At 58, Vinod Khosla remains as zealous about startups. At a media interaction, followed by a session with entrepreneurs in Bangalore on Thursday, he urged them to tread the unbeaten path and take risks. Excerpts:

Gloom and doom times are good times for startups: Some people have a short-term view of the world. And private equity normally does. But startups can't do that. They can IPO in, at best, six-seven years. So they must take a longer-term perspective. And then, gloom and doom times are sometimes the best times, because what happens is nobody is investing, good people leave big companies because they don't have interesting things to work on. The best startups happen in gloom and doom times. When funding is hard to come by, they think more about their plans, become more equipped to handle risks.

A vibrant product startup environment is emerging: Three years ago when I was in India, I didn't see any product startup. Two years ago, I came for a Nasscom event and I saw some interesting product startups. When there are a thousand startups in India, there will be one that's worth talking about. Take Facebook, it's 10 years old. So it will take six to ten years from when those thousand startups start for product startups to become visible in a big way.

An Indian Zuckerberg is inevitable in five-six years: The key thing missing in India is that there aren't enough successful role models. In the US, once a Harvard dropout does a very successful venture, there are thousands of others who will want to follow that path, parents will be less resistant to it. Once you have a Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg here, things will change. It will happen in the next five-six years, and that will take care of even other issues like regulation and funding.

Data mining & machine learning are emerging opportunities: Mobile and internet will remain big opportunities for Indian startups. A big emerging opportunity is in data mining and machine learning, where you are replacing human judgment in many ways. Computing systems have become powerful and cheap enough to enable this. Driverless cars is one example. Soon we'll see it being applied in areas ranging from advertising to medicine. We have invested in a company that's making a candy that's healthier than regular candy. We have invested in Pune-based Driptech, which has enabled drip irrigation in a one-acre farm for Rs 15,000, as against the traditional method that costs Rs 50,000.

Believe in your idea as a religion, take risks: I bet nobody here (in the audience) has gone through as many failures as I have, only because I have tried more things than anybody else. Unless we take risks, we are not going to do anything innovative. Allow yourself to fail in many small things, and adjust to what does not work. And don't be swung by what everybody else is doing.